Recently, much attention has been given to the fact that telephone subscribers have dramatically increased mobility, so that there is a need to assure that calls directed TO the subscriber are forwarded to the destination at which s/he is located at the time the call is made. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,313,035 issued to Jordan et al. describes a Person Locator Service by which calls directed to a subscriber at home can be forwarded to the called party's office, car, hotel room, etc., depending upon the status of information contained in a database record that is updated when the subscriber is away from home. Application Ser. No. 07/607,925 filed Nov. 1, 1990, and assigned to the same assignee as the present invention, describes one approach for automatically updating the information stored in the database.
Despite the attention given to the re-direction of calls made TO a "mobile" telephone subscriber (as used herein, a "mobile" subscriber is a subscriber originating a call from a wired or wireless telephone that can change locations from home, car, boat, office, etc.--this term is not limited to a subscriber in a vehicle), little attention has been paid to the outbound calls made BY a mobile subscriber from stations other than the station normally used by that subscriber. For example, an employee of company X may wish to make business-related calls from his/her home. In that event, while individual calls could be billed to company X using a company credit card, the calls would be treated by the telecommunications network as being made from home and not the office, and would not have the "characteristics" of a call made from the office. Specifically, if the company, as a customer of a telecommunications provider, subscribed to a special billing arrangement such as WATS or MEGACOM or used a Software Defined Network, a call originated from home would not be entitled to corporate billing rates. In addition, if the telecommunications network was set up such that calls originating at the office phone were provided with features like speed dialing, outgoing call screening, wide area calling or any of a host of other services offered to telecommunications subscribers, these features would not be available from the home phone, unless advance arrangements were made. These arrangements, called provisioning, normally require a call to the telephone business office, and a relatively long period of time (usually hours to days) in order to effect the changes in the telephone switching equipment necessary to effectuate the desired changeover.
One arrangement for addressing certain needs of "mobile" subscribers (as defined above) is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,899,373 issued to C. Lee et al. on Feb. 6, 1990. In the Lee arrangement, personalized feature data associated with a subscriber is stored in a database in association with a personal identification number (PIN). A subscriber wishing to use personalized features while away from home dials a special code from a target station connected to local exchange which has access to the database. When the PIN is validated, the feature data is retrieved from the database and stored in the local exchange from which the call was placed. Thereafter, telephone service initiated at the target station will be rendered to the subscriber with the desired personalized features.
While the Lee arrangement gives mobile subscribers the ability to temporarily change certain features of outgoing calls, the patented system does not contemplate providing a subscriber initiating a call at a target station with advanced billing options usually provided only at the home station. Also, the request for a change in call characteristics must be initiated from the particular target station that is to be changed. This means that a mobile subscriber cannot effectuate the desired changes remotely, in advance, before he or she reaches the destination at which the target station is located.
Furthermore, the Lee arrangement would be difficult to use when long distance calls are to be made from the target station, and the target station is distant from the subscriber's home station. This is because the patentee contemplates changing the Automatic Number Identification (ANI) information associated with the target station. Thus, with the Lee arrangement, when a long distance call is initiated from a target station that is distant from the subscriber's home station, the ANI associated with the home station will be forwarded from the local exchange to the toll switch serving the target station. This could create confusion and a possible operating problem, since each long distance (toll) switch has knowledge only of the ANIs for stations that "home" on that switch. In addition, use of the home station's ANI in the target station may cause a long distance call to be rated improperly, leading to incorrect charges.